Epress.am News from Armenia
About two dozen demonstrators gathered outside the National Assembly building in Yerevan Tuesday morning to find out what Armenian lawmakers thought about the members of the “Daredevils of Sasun” armed group and their current situation in prison. Demonstrator Varsenik Hovhannisyan, namely, told an Epress.am reporter that she came to the protest “to understand who the MPs are and what they actually do.”
“We also want to know what the lawmakers intend to do about the people who've built our country,” Hovhannisyan added, referencing the armed group which was majorly comprised of veterans of the Nagorno-Karabakh war.
Another participant of the demonstration, prominent civic activist Vardges Gaspari, said that he was particularly interested in the opinion of the lawmakers representing the opposition Armenian National Congress faction because those were the MPs he had given his vote to at the last parliamentary elections. Gaspari added that ANC lawmakers “should not forget that Armenia's current political elite came to power through violence and killings.”
“Looks like the MPs I voted for have forgotten about the March 1 murders [a reference to the 2008 post-election events]. I don't recall them condemning the casualties of the April war either,” the activist said, adding that “one would expect that ANC lawmakers' opinion would be different than that of Republican Party's puppet oppositionists.”
According to the demonstrators, the majority of the parliamentarians ignored their protest action; only Hovhannes Margaryan, a representative of the opposition Rule of Law faction, came up to them to say that he did not mind that “Daredevils of Sasun” members be released under amnesty.